16 ms·

Ask HN: Have tech salaries been stagnant for the past decade?

• disgruntledphd2 4y ago
  I suspect that most of the extra cash reported by people is stock, which was dependent on massive QE injected by the world's central banks and really low interest rates making future revenues more attractive.
  • lotsofpulp 4y ago
    Being able to give out $100k+ RSUs probably had something to do with record breaking profits and growth quarter after quarter for 10+ years. The government reducing the purchasing power of the currency is certainly needed for the nominal figures, but so are the stellar bottom lines relative to other businesses.
    • disgruntledphd2 4y ago
      Sure, but I don't think MAGMA really intended their 150k grants in 2012 to be worth 600k. This stock price inflation was definitely driven by super low interest rates, hence my point.
• 4ad 4y ago
  Salaries are trimodal, companies only publish figures for the lower distribution, if they advertise anything at all. This article is mostly about Europe, but it applies worldwide: https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/software-engineering-salaries-in-the-netherlands-and-europe https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/software-engineering-sala....
  • ciphol 4y ago
    Isn't the determining factor not which companies your employer competes against, but where the jobs are located? For example Google pays "tier 3" compensation packages to its Bay Area employees, but compensation for a Google employee in Bangalore would be much lower.
• Dig1t 4y ago
  It’s TC (total compensation) that matters. Salaries haven’t changed a lot, but a lot of senior engineers at big companies are making 350k-400k a year total, most of which is stock. It vests every 6 months usually, in chunks of 50,70,100k. Usually there’s a bonus sometime in the year as well of anywhere from 15k-25k.
  • 4ad 4y ago
    I would say that cash+RSUs is what matters, pre-IPO companies usually offers options which should be values differently.
  • IaacForHire 4y ago
    Sadly outside of FAANG this is not the case at all. Total compensation out of non-faang is: Salary + worthless stock option and maybe a 3% 401k match if they're more than 5 years old.
    • brandall10 4y ago
      There's many companies that compete for FAANG talent and pay that type of comp or come within 15% or so of it. Just peruse levels.fyi
      • IaacForHire 4y ago
        I'm not sure I can believe that. The companies who hire for average senior engineers like me do not compete with FAANG. They hire the 90% of us who aren't rockstars and have accepted we have no upward mobility in our careers. I know very many devops/software engineers in San Francisco making $140k-$150k total comp.
        • brandall10 4y ago
          Sure, the vast majority do. But to say that only a small handful of companies pay this is just untrue... it's probably in the high double or even triple digits. Many namebrand non-FAANG (ie. Linked-In, Uber, Snap, Slack) do, and some you might not even think of. One example - OpenDoor, which pays over $400k for a regular senior engineer. Additionally, it's not uncommon for small NYC fintechs to pay straight cash comp of $350k+ for basic senior fullstack devs. All these places do the standard FAANG type interviews though. They're all competing for the same talent pool, and typically they're full of ex-FAANG engineers.
• Knight69 4y ago
  [dead]
• oxff 4y ago
  In Europe they've probably gone down the past decade I'd say.
  • that_guy_iain 4y ago
    For me, it seems they're going up. 5-years ago, I would ask for 65,000€ in Berlin and that would be considered extremely high for my role now it seems 75,000€ is where the asking price is.
    • IaacForHire 4y ago
      So 3% per year, or just a little bitover inflation. Still, better than the US where we don't really get inflationary raises.
  • finikytou 4y ago
    in pure Euro no they went up a bit but definitly lower than the cost of living increase. the problem is that in the past decade Europe welcomed Cyprus, Czech Republic,Estonia,Hungary,Latvia, Lithuania,Malta , Poland ,Slovakia,Slovenia,Bulgaria ,Romania, Croatia. Most of those countries were below living standards/salaries of western europe while having for some of them a very strong education system. Romania for instance trains a lot of good devs/it ops. All this qualified workforce can work in any country of europe. Add to this qualified workforce from syria/turkey for germany, North Africa for france and you see that while European companies did not grow like the US one, the pool of talent they can grab is larger than ever. the cake became smaller and Europe did everything it could toblock ambitious tech companies to grow and use the stock market as a wealth tool. they don't even understand that they operate in a global market and that if they tax or limit growth in their own country then the companies will move out. Dublin and Amsterdam for instance became hubs for this reason. There is also the perception in the old world that being a "Techie" is like being a white collar factory worker. Developers are definitly not considered as stars in Europe. Most of the engineers in europe that want to make money work for an american company.
    • walthamstow 4y ago
• dylanhassinger 4y ago
  I'm just a midwesterner, but I'd say it all depends. Some startups just don't have the money to throw around where they can list a position over 150k. For companies that do have that money, they change the title - I do a lot of DevOps but I am a Solution Architect. Some companies have Platform Architect role(s). Edit: and everyone needs experienced Site Reliability Engineers For many non-tech companies, in-house salaries might be pegged low but then they hire contractors which can command high rates, perhaps billing as much as $200/hr (granted, a cut comes out of that). Also these contractors can conceivably be handling more than 1 client.
  • 988747 4y ago
    Handling more than 1 client isn't doing you any good if you are still paid by the hour. What would be a game changer is if you can be paid fixed price for some well defined piece of work (writing an app module, creating cloud infrastructure for a single environment, etc). Another game changer is if they allow you to subcontract boring parts of your task to your own "employees".
• CommanderData 4y ago
  European permanent salaries have been coming down. UK contractors take home less now than they did 5 years ago due to taxation changes (IR35). The tax changes have also made the market a bit strange where rates are still advertised at £500 a day even though, contractor takes home significantly less money. These have not gone up inline.
  • jheriko 4y ago
    * dishonest and ethically corrupt contractors now take home less thanks to IR35. for the rest of us, it was a non-event.
    • badpun 4y ago
      Let him who is without sin cast the first stone.
      • Silhouette 4y ago
        There are plenty of people working as contractors or freelancers in the UK who are without sin in this respect. Not everyone - or even most people - working independently is trying to evade tax. In fact financially most people would be better off as employees now if you directly compare salary with contract rates as if they meant the same thing. The big advantages of contracting and freelancing are about flexibility and being able to price on value and not according to whatever trends are happening in the employment market.
        • varispeed 4y ago
          Independent contractors where not doing anything different than larger agencies. Same service, just with more attractive pricing. The difference between a small business and agency is that agency can actually afford to properly avoid paying tax. The taxes have been changed anyway, so the mythical small salary + dividend, does not offer meaningful advantage any more when it comes to tax. The real problem is that IR35 removes profit from the company and the company has no way of offsetting legitimate business costs against tax (like your office, accountant, insurance, tools, software etc.) and you also can't retain part of the invoice and taking lower salary and dividend to have a cushion for the times out of clients or when you want to build capital for a start up idea. It has completely killed entrepreneurship. It means less competition, less jobs and smaller growth of the economy. Not sure how is that a good idea.
• t-3 4y ago
  In San Fransisco rents and home prices are very high (an errything else, I gather). You probably have a comparable life on average, just fewer chances to get 'retire early' money at a young age and less absolute value of extra cash.
• Silhouette 4y ago
  A good question to ask might be why salaries should go up significantly. We're lucky enough to work in a very well compensated industry but we're also in a kind of bubble where sometimes the economics are strange. In the good times when VCs are falling over themselves to fund anything that might be the next FAANG there is a huge amount of money pouring into the industry and a lot of hiring going on and none of that is necessarily tied to getting good results. Businesses can survive for years while hiring lots of people for crazy money without ever making a profit. The VCs can still do very well because every now and then they do back a unicorn but on an individual company basis this disconnect between how much money they have and how much money they make is not "normal" and severely distorts the employment market. It's unrealistic to expect the magic money tree to continue growing gold leaves in the economic bad times. Big tech firms aren't immune to a downturn and we'll see hiring slowing down in the places where it was artificially boosted before and compensation falling with it. That will partly be because compensation that is based on stock is probably going to take a big hit at a lot of companies. With this in mind it wouldn't be entirely surprising if salaries today were similar to those 15 years ago. In the meantime there might have been rapid growth in some years but we've also had two multi-year black swan events. Time will tell whether the ups and downs have cancelled each other out in this case but I don't think that would be a big surprise.
  • ethbr0 4y ago
    The way I see it, there are two fundamental very different but conflated drivers of high tech salaries. 1) Software companies are enormously profitable per employee, because of zero duplication- and low scaling- costs. Consequently, companies with high total customer counts can afford high compensation. 2) New software companies often have extremely high growth, which makes them attractive to capital, which overvalues their shares (relative to other businesses and pre- and post-IPO), which allows them to cheaply (for them) boost compensation. I'd expect companies in the first bucket to continue paying high salaries (aka MAMAA), but monetary policy has severely cut the second bucket's ability to do so. Consequently, lower salary increase pressure across the board.
  • yuvadam 4y ago
    US M2 money supply has grown 40% compared to pre-COVID, 220% in the last decade. If your salary hasn't matched that, you are literally earning less in real terms.
• mrweasel 4y ago
  That's a hard question. I'm in Denmark, which is notoriously expensive, and I'd say that even $120K for Sr DevOps is a bit on the high end. There where a period of time with large "year on year" jumps in pay from 2010 to 2018 (something like that). That does seem to have cooled of in the past four years. I did see a brief surge in positions offered and higher wages last year, but that stopped in during spring time this year. My guess is that it's either a reaction to salaries already being high or the general economic slowdown, in some areas. Again it might very well depend on your location, but the positions offered are also changing. I see more and more operations related position, and generally jobs postings a from companies that aren't software companies as such,. They are just companies that needs developer for internal project or software as part of a larger system. The positions I see are very much: "We have a job that needs to get done, and just need an additional developer (or systems administrator)". There are much less of crazy "We're changing the world and are looking for ninja-pirate-elite-10x-super hackers", and the former simply pays less.
  • yrgulation 4y ago
    Issue in denmark is that high pay gets heavily taxed. So 102k is what 50k at best? Factor in vat and its less.
    • coffee_beqn 4y ago
      True but you also get more “free” services for your tax payments - especially if you have kids.
      • yrgulation 4y ago
        Like anywhere in europe, and if you want quality or quick service you go private.
    • mrweasel 4y ago
      Why would that push salaries down? Should they be even higher in that case?
• hardware2win 4y ago
  It feels like salaries in Poland went up Now 7x minimal wage after tax is not as impressive as 5-8 years ago
  • cube2222 4y ago
    They skyrocketed when remote work became ubiquitous. Which means you can get Western European (occasionally even American, with a few companies) salaries, while enjoying the low taxation of sole proprietorships in Poland (8-20% depending on how you set yourself up legally) and low costs of living.
  • 988747 4y ago
    If you only make 7x minimal wage after tax then you are severely underpaid. 10-12x is the standard now.
    • gbajson 4y ago
      Experience is an important factor here. Minimal wage in 2022 is 3010 PLN (~630 Eur), so juniors/mids rather won't make 10-12x.
    • hardware2win 4y ago
      14k PLN netto = underpaid?
      • 988747 4y ago
        It at the low end of mid-level developer salary range. Some companies will pay close to that to a bright, promising Junior with 2 years of experience.
• atemerev 4y ago
  No, total compensations in FAANG and a few other well-financed companies went up. For everyone else, it went down. So, it's either FAANG or bust.
  • jollyllama 4y ago
    As someone who has no desire to work in FAANG, it's unfortunate.
• bradleyjg 4y ago
  Tech, like law, is a bimodal market. If you think of it as a single bell curve your intuitions will be all wrong. The good news is that unlike law it’s possible to jump into the better paying market even if you didn’t go to the “right” school.
  • yrgulation 4y ago
    Thats odd. I know loads of lawyers living in mansions while loads of “highly paid” developers live with housemates, or rent tiny homes. If anything, software development pay has reached construction worker pay. At least we dont have to sit out in the cold.
    • IaacForHire 4y ago
      I have a cousin who makes $220k as a crane operator at a port. I'll never make that much in my career.
      • yrgulation 4y ago
        A welder in london charges 700£ plus per day. A bit difficult to reach as a software engineer.
        • hashar 4y ago
          My place has a large shipyard and as story I got told is that good welder lands there with a private jet, do their welding then fly to the next place. I am guessing good welders have a niche market as well.
          • ethbr0 4y ago
            Great story, because it demonstrates what people often fail to think about in salary: your hypothetical maximum salary is bounded by the amount of value you add to the finished product. If you're a key component (welder) in a high priced product (ship), the builder can compensate you $$$$ and still win. So they do. You can temporarily have unreasonably high pay (higher than value added), but eventually the market will figure it out. The only way to make outsized returns your entire career is to find a supply-limited, high-value-add niche.
• wilde 4y ago
  I mean the companies advertising the hardest are often the ones who can’t hire and retain due to underpay, bad culture, etc. Unless you’re willing to spend a bunch of money on a comp benchmarking dataset, I think the best self-published one is levels.fyi. Those values are below median but not uncommon based on that data.
• gsibble 4y ago
  Having worked in startups in SF and now Boston for the last 12 years, I first started making my current salary in 2014 and have never made more than that from one job. So in real figures, salaries have come down quite a bit due to inflation. Only real way to make money in tech is FAANG. I've owned so much worthless stock it's basically a meme.
  • swyx 4y ago
    as in, all the non FAANG startup stock you earned became worthless? its actually kind of rare to have that high of a failure rate in startups, particularly by name brand VCs. feel like at worst you get a shitty acquihire but you at least get _something_ for your stock
    • IaacForHire 4y ago
      Personally I've only ever gotten close to making $$ off of stock once, but got fired 2 weeks before my first vesting period because I took 2 weeks off after my father's death. Every other start-up I've worked for either went under, never exited or had an exit only the founders profited from. This is probably true for 99% of all start-ups.
      • oconnore 4y ago
        > fired 2 weeks before my first vesting period because I took 2 weeks off after my father's death That seems quite implausible. Not that the managers there weren’t jerks, or that this didn’t contribute to the conflict, but there seems to be a lack of reflection on this story because there is almost certainly more to it than that.
        • cableshaft 4y ago
          It's very plausible. I can see managers get bent out of shape for people taking sudden time off (which is bound to happen when a family member dies), likely because they don't have proper redundancy in place (at least that's been the case at pretty much every company I've worked for), and might be put into a bind as a result, and feel resentment against their employee when they shouldn't. So they get rid of them and hire someone else. Most of the US has at-will employment, and they can terminate you at any time for any legal reason, and there's no federal-level laws on offering bereavement time off, so I bet this happens more often than you think (at least a cursory google search brings up quite a few people telling stories of it happening to them).
• jmconfuzeus 4y ago
  It could be because of remote work. Why should a company pay you $250k+ when they can hire someone from Philippines for $25k (10x less money) or less? I'm not saying this is a good thing but simply the reality. I've applied to a few remote positions recently and have been offered peanuts for salary because of my 3rd world country citizenship. And as far as I know, my work is indistinguishable from that of silicon valley engineers. Companies like Turing are advertising to engineers living in 3rd world countries because their clients want top talent for less money.
• datacruncher01 4y ago
  US tech salaries are good for only one reason, the largest tech companies went the path of public stock valuations and paid employees with stock. If anything, it's an indicator of the vast difference in income for people who make a living with assets vs people who still need to trade their labor for a paycheck. Tech salaries are going to be on a decline for a while with the Fed rate hike, like it or not, most tech companies are floating on VC money and that all depends on a stock market giving them high valuations. In situations we're in now, fundamentals start to matter and the phony valuations get corrected.
  • pid-1 4y ago
    > Tech salaries are going to be on a decline for a while with the Fed rate hike Isn't that true for the whole economy?
    • bottled_poe 4y ago
      No. Another hard truth is that some jobs are more essential than others.
      • dsr_ 4y ago
        Sanitation. Childcare. Primary education. Fire departments. Groceries. If your city doesn't have those, it stops being a livable place pretty quickly.
        • toast0 4y ago
          Cost of housing goes down quite a bit too.
    • giantg2 4y ago
      In fact, were seeing the largest increases in pay over the past two years (and i think in real pay too), and they're forecasting that will continue this year as well. This is much more prominent in the lower paying jobs than in professional ones.
• helen___keller 4y ago
  I would assume pay at a fixed level doesn’t go up that fast. For an individual though you are gaining experience and should be able to use that to leverage at least small raises, big ones if you’re moving up in seniority In 7 years out of university I went (some raises, some job hops) 80 to 85 to 97 to 130 to 165 to 300 I dont think the market is much more lucrative, but there’s a very big difference between junior engineer at small tech and senior engineer at big tech
• simonebrunozzi 4y ago
  Let's not forget how Adobe, Apple, Google, Intel, Intuit, Pixar, Lucasfilm and eBay, colluded to pay lower salaries [0]. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_Litigation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...
  • jasonlotito 4y ago
    People forget this. And how this had a greater impact across the industry. Because other companies could pay less and compete. And because of this, even though it happened over a decade ago, it had a long-term affect of keeping salaries lower than they should have been.
• dralley 4y ago
  Relative to almost any other career in the US, the answer to this is an easy "NO". Salaries have been stagnant across the board but tech salaries are probably the least stagnant of any category.
• thelastgallon 4y ago
  People move when there is a better offer. Replacement hires come in at higher pay. Which means people who didn't move would also have pay raises (same role/level, pay parity). Some companies colluded to stop people from moving [1]. Only a small fraction may have moved, but it would have had cascading effects across the industry. FAANG people get paid a lot more, other companies have to keep up, they may not match adtech/SV pay, but have to be competitive. I'd say everyone in US is getting paid 50K - 100K less per year because of this. This may seem high, but factor in nearly 20 years of cumulative raises. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_Litigation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...
• yieldcrv 4y ago
  There are tri-modal compensation bands in tech midsize and non-tech companies are doing $50k-120k VC backed startups and large non-tech companies are doing $80k-$170k publicly traded big tech, tokenized crypto startups, and established crypto companies are doing $120-250k base salary plus another $200-400k in some form of non-cash but easily convertible to cash compensation for $400-$600k total annual compensation
  • wikibob 4y ago
    The only correct answer in this entire comment section.
• ny-anon 4y ago
  Going anon for this I grew up poor, got in trouble with the law at 18 - but was coding since I was 9, now I have been writing software for 20+ years professionally, no degree, and have never been able to clear more than 250k - moved from coding to mgmt but still cant break 250. I looked at changing companies to a FAANG but haven’t been able to dedicate the massive amount of time needed to prep for the algo whiteboard / leetcode interview process (which I still don’t really understand as most of the actual work needed to be done will require 0 of this) After taxes my take home is so low I still can’t afford to own a home here in ny. Tried migrating to sv a few years back but it’s even more expensive than ny. I’ve always kept my hands on skills up to date, coded large distributed systems that are in prod supporting millions of daily’s, big data pipelines capturing billions of records daily and as mgmt, onboarded and trained juniors who’ve gone on to big tech and been able to far surpass me in earnings. Disillusioned and wondering what advice HN might suggest. - ny anon, beard greying and hope depleting
  • JustLurking2022 4y ago
    Have you looked into living in NJ? In honesty, I don't know that there'll be much sympathy for someone able to make $250k/yr with no degree. NYC is an expensive place to live period. Virtually everyone I know who lives in the city rents.
  • jongjong 4y ago
    They probably have a rich, well connected daddy. For normal people, $250k is probably as high as you can possibly go. I also have experience with distributed systems, worked 80 hours a week for 10 years straight and built several popular open source projects and I can't get past $80k... Almost feels like a conspiracy against me at this stage but I suspect it just comes down to not having a rich daddy who is connected to politicians and corporate execs. If you look at any rich person these days with a high salary, there is always a rich daddy, rich mommy, rich sugarmomma, rich sugardaddy or rich buddies pulling strings behind the scenes. It's just the new spoiled brat reality. HR people probably run candidates through an opaque automated system which filters out anyone who doesn't have a rich sugardaddy.
    • 4y ago
• deleted 4y ago
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• anon-ATL 4y ago
  Anon account. I've seen salaries continue to climb. My base salary over the last 4 years: 2022: $165k 2021: $150k 2020: $145k 2019: $135k 20 years experience, non-FAANG, no college degree, LCOL town about 90 minutes outside of Atlanta. I've been remote for 10+ years and only apply to companies that know I'm not willing to go into the office. I changed jobs in 2019 and 2022. I do front end .net work.
  • anon-midwest 4y ago
    Also anon account with some more data to add. From my perspective, US salaries have rapidly jumped in the past few years. My total comp increased significantly over the past few years at the same company, and then astronomically more once I bit the bullet and applied to new jobs. - 2015: 85k in HCOL area - 2018: 115k in LCOL area (remote) - 2021: 180k in LCOL area (remote) - 2022: 280k in LCOL area (remote, FAANG) I work remotely from the US midwest with 7 YoE. I have several colleagues with fewer YoE making much more than me at both FAANG and pre-IPO startups, but in HCOL areas.
    • anon-ATL 4y ago
      My wife and I say to each other that this can't last forever and we say (half jokingly) that we're overpaid and hope no one realizes it too quickly. She's in the field (not a developer) and makes more than I do. Our plan is to keep at it as long as we can and get to a point were we are debt free (including the house) and then move to a LCOL area in another country when the salaries crash.
• twodave 4y ago
  Once you get out of the big cities there is a big drop-off. The last 3 years have brought a bit of balance but the gap is still large. Where I live 200k is a CEO salary, and there’s a lot of resistance to going above that for other employees (even in $100MM+ companies with plenty of budget to burn). In places like where I live you basically need a side job to get to 250k. I do about 10 extra hours a week and it nets me a 30% increase on my regular salary + benefits. I wish my employer would notice this and just offer me a 30% raise for my undivided attention, but I’ll also do what I have to in order to maximize my income and they’ll just have to respect that :)
• purpleblue 4y ago
  10 years ago I was making 145k base salary. This year I'm making 220k base salary. Both as Senior Software Engineer. I don't think they are stagnating at all.
  • moralestapia 4y ago
    Could you provide more details so I can add to my anecdata? :) Is that on the same company? Different company but the same role? Or just job hopping here and there?
    • purpleblue 4y ago
      Different company, same role as senior software engineer. In 10 years I've had 4 jobs, although one was only for 6 months, and I recently started a new job.
      • moralestapia 4y ago
        Thanks!
• mcv 4y ago
  My income has definitely not been stagnant for the past decade, but I'm a freelancer. Last year I briefly was an employee, and I was appalled at what that meant for my income. It was not $120k-$160k, it was more like €70k.
• socialismisok 4y ago
  I know it's an unpopular opinion around here, but it's worth considering if forming tech unions could help. Tech companies are making huge profits per employee but holding wages down. We can build unions based on our democratic interests - what do we care about? Salary, benefits, paid oncall, IP restrictions, open source, etc. We don't have to sign up with one of the giant calcified corrupt US unions, there are plenty of shops out there that are more modern and give local groups much more autonomy.
  • Test0129 4y ago
    Unions are popular in fields like construction, medicine, teaching, etc because of: 1. The field otherwise would be chronically underpaid 2. The field is dangerous, or has a history of encouraging dangerous behavior 3. The field makes moving between jobs quickly hard 4. The field is antiquated, and the union is essentially a protection racket for prior skilled workers (this is very common in "older" fields). Programming is none of these. Wages may be stagnating at the FAANGs but they certainly aren't anywhere else. My own experience with unions has me leary. In exchange for protection you mentioned we get: 1. Pitiful raises because they are no longer based on merit but "representation" 2. possibly better benefits 3. possibly better on call. Given if I don't like a company I can mark "looking for work" on linkedin and get 30+ job offers in a week I see no purpose. The looking for work button is your union. Literally, just get a new job. Tech companies may enjoy the idea of a union. You end up getting journeyman programmers and often times they will be for less than what a merit rate would give. The key here is merit. A driver of our field. Since raises are given to everyone they are smaller. Those 30k+ pay bumps you get switching jobs? Gone. Busting your ass for a 10k raise at the end of the year because you merit it? Gone. Taking classes at the university? Gone, most college union work programs require you to join a union to even take the class. For what? Even "underpaid" programmers make 2x the average salary of almost any other field. You're going to have to convince people making 100k+ in a country where the average family makes 60k that they should unionize "for their own protection". It will never happen.
    • ausbah 4y ago
      >Unions are popular in fields like construction, medicine, teaching, etc because of: 1. The field otherwise would be chronically underpaid what world are you living in where these are considered fairly compensated?
• runako 4y ago
  20+ years in the industry, here's my quick take on your situation in the spirit of constructive feedback: - You're far enough into your career that you will have to actively work on your career and/or self in order to achieve your next set of objectives. The early career momentum has worn off. - You need to upgrade your resume. Pay someone a few hundred $ to help you with this. Resume writing does not appear to be a strength of yours, learn and improve. - I hire contractors globally for myself and clients. Your resume is easily worth $125/hr on the contract market. If you're only getting $60-$80, there may be some other factors you are not disclosing here that are keeping your rate down. It would be worth engaging with those factors if you want to increate your compensation. Edit: look on a site like Upwork to see what people with your background are earning on the contract market. - The emphasis on San Francisco compensation has obscured the fact that comp has been rising in the rest of the US. First, obviously West Coast companies are much more open to remote/satellite offices. For example, Microsoft and Google have engineering offices in Atlanta. You can see what folks are making by going to a site like levels.fyi and filtering for DevOps, 10-20 years experience and looking outside of California. (Nvidia @ $300k for Senior DevOps in Raleigh looks like a good cost-of-living vs comp.) - If you look outside of pure tech companies, you will likely have to go into management to hit the high numbers. With your experience, if you are able/willing to lend and/or manage engineering teams, you should be able to get into the $250k range in most major US cities. Advantage to non-tech companies is they are more likely to have sane work-life balance. - You may want to consider expanding your skills into a niche. For example, are you able to help companies build data pipelines for data engineering? Machine Learning? There are some fairly niche problems in that area; knowledge of any of those would help you differentiate yourself and drive higher pay. Good luck!
  • Test0129 4y ago
    I think OPs problem is going into management. Base pay is typically higher than an IC but a high flying IC can clear more easily. As you mentioned specializing is the key. Data engineering is the new hotness. Failing that, I can echo your sentiment on the contract market. I can (and have for a short time) doubled my employee salary after taxes going self-employed. If you can keep a list of clients and not work for a contract firm (which is hard but doable) you have a lot of avenues for better benefits via SEP-IRA, entrepreneur healthcare programs, etc that you will never get as a W-2.
• deleted 4y ago
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• swozey 4y ago
  I'm not in SF or anywhere close to that COL and I make over 200 in Ops (SRE specifically, but no diff from devops). What is your skillset? Can you write go or another language? Learning to develop is what bumped me from a Sysadmin/Devops to SRE and hugely increased my salary. I thought I was stuck in the 160-170s until I did that.
• kevstev 4y ago
  I have more than quadrupled my comp over the last 10 years, and I have not worked at a F*NG. I have not really climbed the ladder much either, I went from a senior to tech lead and manager back to a tech lead/IC. My comp is almost entirely cash as well, though I am fortunate in that regard. This is in the US in the NYC area.
  • MisterSandman 4y ago
    The thing you're forgetting to mention is that you're probably a very good and talented SWE. The average SWE is not. :P
    • therealdrag0 4y ago
      Or started relatively underpaid.
      • kevstev 4y ago
        10 years ago I was making 150, and relatively underpaid I guess. At least I was not making the sums that others in the algo trading/hft space were.
• gbajson 4y ago
  Not in Poland. They grew ~3-4 times during last 10 years. COVID-19 definitely helped here!
  • 411111111111111 4y ago
    Thats quite surprising to me as a german neighbour. the salary gap in europe is usually small... It would move from basically minimum wage up to the top 10% of earners if the wage multiplied by 3-4 within the last 10 yrs. (from 20k to 60-80k) And 20k would be a _really_ low payment for a developer working fulltime, even in 2012. What were the numbers you had in mind if I may ask?
• skhameneh 4y ago
  I've found wages to be increasing, but not necessarily against inflation. General trends I've gathered (opinionated loose observations): - Wages in smaller cities have increased the most. - Costs of living in smaller cities have greatly increased relating to remote work and current events. - Wages have greatly increased at the very top and upper bottom. - Median wages have increased the least and often not kept up with inflation. - Wages at the very bottom haven't changed much. Personally, I don't believe my wages have kept up with inflation and cost of living. ~10 years ago I was on salary without stock and my current base pay is ~16% lower, my target TC is only 35% higher, but reality is looking more like 20% more. If I were to target 5% growth in pay per year, the increase should be closer to 62%. And keep in mind housing costs have more than doubled... All of this completely ignores career growth, my title is higher than it was 10 years ago.
• navjack27 4y ago
  It would be pretty cool of teachers made that kind of salary... Teachers of all grades and all schools...
  • 411111111111111 4y ago
    The only way this would make economic sense would be quite immoral from my point of view, so honest question: why should an organisation pay them such salaries, unless they can effectively enslave the taught pupils until they've made that money back? Or are you arguing that it should be done through socialism and taxes? In that case, whats the rationale for that? The society won't gain significant value from this, and would have significantly less money available for other things. Do keep in mind that teachers usually still get more money then the average salary while having significantly more time off-work.
• faangiq 4y ago
  No. FAANG and their wannabe competitors started paying more over the past 15 years. But all other tech jobs have been stagnant that’s correct. It’s because companies view engineers as code monkeys. And they’re right for the most part because that’s how our profession behaves. Unfortunately you take a group of smart (sort of) people with below average social skills, and they WILL get exploited to the max. Even FAANG underpays by a factor of 2-3x.
  • dennis_jeeves1 4y ago
    >Unfortunately you take a group of smart (sort of) people with below average social skills, and they WILL get exploited to the max. Yep, the average engineer including the mediocre ones are often leagues above your average white collar worker in terms of hard skill, but sorely lack (collective) social skills.
• kthejoker2 4y ago
  Houston, analytics, last 10 years salaries, bonuses, 401k match, and stock ... FTE 110, 118, 130, Consulting 140, 152, 158, 175, 187, 201 Databricks 230 + ~100k in RSUs Broadly I would say if you feel underpaid for your skills go into consulting or join a startup heavily aligned to your skills, they will be the only folks who can extract enough value from your skills to compensate you for them.